A top psychologist says there's only one way to become the best in your field — but not everyone agrees

As a teenager in Sweden,
Anders Ericsson used to play chess against one of his classmates,
a boy considerably worse at the game than Ericsson. Every time
they'd play, Ericsson would trounce him.

Then one day, the
classmate beat him.

Ericsson wanted to know:
What exactly had the boy done to improve his performance so
drastically?

Though Ericsson didn't
realize it then, the question would come to define his life's
work.

In the years that
followed his defeat at the hands of his classmate,
Ericsson found himself less interested in
improving at chess and more interested
in learning how people improve at
anything.

Today, Ericsson is a
professor
of psychology at Florida State University, where he
specializes, among many topics, in the science of peak
performance. He is, in other words, an expert on experts.

According
to Ericsson's research and logic, the sole reason you
aren't a virtuoso violinist, or an Olympic athlete, or another
kind of world-class performer, is that you haven't engaged in a
process he calls "deliberate practice."

In general, according to
Ericsson, deliberate practice involves stepping outside your
comfort zone and trying activities beyond your current
abilities. While repeating a skill you've already mastered might
be satisfying, it's not enough to help you get better.
Moreover, simply wanting to improve isn't enough — people
also need well-defined goals and the help of a teacher who
makes a plan for achieving them.

At first, the teacher
gives feedback on your efforts; eventually, you can spot problems
in your own performance and tweak it accordingly. Ericsson's
research has led him to study
expert spellers, elite athletes, and memory champions —
and he attributes their diverse successes to deliberate
practice.

Most
notably, Ericsson's work on deliberate practice formed the
basis for the "10,000-hour rule" featured in Malcolm Gladwell's
book, "Outliers":
Put in about 10,000 hours of practice, and you'll become an
expert.

Gladwell likely drew his
conclusions from
a paper that Ericsson and his colleagues published in 1993,
which studied 40 violinists in Germany. Specifically, the
researchers focused on what factors differentiated the
best musicians from the good or the mediocre ones.

After asking all the
violinists to give detailed records of how they spent their time,
on music practice as well as on other activities, the
researchers found that the top two groups of violinists
spent significantly more hours practicing alone than the others
did. The researchers also studied pianists and yielded similar
conclusions.

On average — and
Gladwell likely drew his conclusion from this — the best
violinists had spent a total of 10,000 hours practicing their
craft by 20 years old. Some, however, had practiced much more, or
less, than that. (Gladwell's publicist didn't respond to a
request for comment.)

Ericsson's findings from
the past three decades suggest that deliberate practice is the
key to achieving high levels of performance in any field.

When I spoke with
Ericsson by phone in May, he told me that people who think
practice can only get you so far aren't talking about the
same kind of practice as he is.

As for whether genetic
differences — say, in cognitive or physical ability — account for
variations in achievement, Ericsson is skeptical.

Height and body size, he
said, are the only genetically predetermined traits that can't be
altered much through practice and have a meaningful impact on
performance.

Even intelligence,
Ericsson said, is not directly linked to expert performance. In
"Peak," he cites a
study by British researchers, which found that
intelligence doesindeedpredict
chess skill among children. But when those researchers looked
only at kids who were elite chess players, a higher IQ was,
in fact, linked to worse skills.

Kids
with high IQs learn how to play chess faster — but once their
peers catch up, they may no longer have an
advantage.Tim
Vizer/AP

While a high IQ helps kids learn the game and acquire the basic
skills required to play, once other kids catch up intelligence
level probably doesn't matter, Ericsson explains. But
deliberate practice does.

"I've been spending now
30 years trying to look for kind of limits that would actually
constrain some individuals from being successful in some domain,"
Ericsson told me. "And I'm surprised that I've yet really to
find such limits."

In the last few years,
however, Ericsson's findings on deliberate practice have come
under intense scrutiny from other psychologists.

Research
published in May 2016 analyzed the results of thousands of
studies and found that while deliberate practice did indeed
account for some of the differences between more and less skilled
athletes, it couldn't account for all of them. The
researchers can't say for sure what other factors matter, but
they propose that genetically influenced physical traits such
as how easily you build muscle mass, and even
psychological traits like confidence, play a role.

Prior, in 2014,
researchers analyzed six studies of chess players and
eight studies of musicians and found that deliberate
practice was not the only explanation for high performance in
either domain. Instead, other factors, like intelligence,
might be at play there as well.

In a response to the
2016 paper, published in the same journal, Ericsson wrote
that these conclusions are inaccurate, largely because they
conflate total hours of accumulate practice with deliberate
practice specifically.

Unless you're performing
exercises that were assigned by a teacher to help you
improve in a particular area, Ericsson believes you're not
engaging in deliberate practice. Plenty of practice activities
are completely ineffective and won't lead to improvement, he
told me when we spoke again in June.

Given
the right practice conditions, could I really become an
exceptional writer?Wikimedia

Reading over the scientific studies on deliberate practice, I
couldn't help but wonder what these findings mean for
professional writers.

Given the right practice
conditions, could I really become the next Tom Wolfe or Michael
Lewis?

Based on my
understanding of Ericsson's research, it would take a lifetime of
adherence to rigid practice criteria — but yes, it would
theoretically be possible.

I posed a similar
question to
D. Zachary Hambrick, a professor of psychology at Michigan
State University who coauthored both the 2014 and 2016 papers
debunking Ericsson's findings.

Hambrick said he didn't
know. To date, no research has explored the role of deliberate
practice in writing expertise. But Hambrick also said
he'd be surprised if writing ability was entirely dependent
on deliberate practice. In other words, unless I started out with
certain requisite abilities, a lifetime might not be enough for
me to achieve Wolfe or Lewis levels.

Hambrick, however, kept
reiterating that practice is important, if not
essential, to the development of expertise in any field.

"I don't think there's
any downside to believing in the power of practice," he said. "I
do think there is a possible downside to sort of
thinking that anybody can accomplish anything with no
limits."

To put it frankly,
believing that people can deliberately practice their way to peak
performance might be a waste of time.

"People might start
training in things and end up not improving much when they could
have invested their resources and energies and time and training
in other things which they might be more likely to excel at,"
Hambrick said.

Beyond the controversy
over whether deliberate practice leads directly to expertise,
perhaps the insight that struck me most in "Peak" was this: To
become an expert, you may need to be willing to sacrifice
short-term pleasure for potential satisfaction of success down
the road. A key tenet of deliberate practice is that it's
generally not enjoyable.

Instead, it's about
doing things that don't come naturally or easily, which can be
tough. "Practice really involves failing a lot until you
eventually reach your goal," Ericsson told me.

Elite
skaters spent more time practicing jumps and
spins.REUTERS/Lucy
Nicholson

He cited research on figure skaters (which appeared in
this book) that found elite skaters spent more time than
average ones practicing jumps and spins in routines they
hadn't yet mastered. By contrast, average skaters spent more time
going over routines they were already good at.

So what's the downside
to becoming an expert? Perhaps it's that you need to devote
yourself wholly to one area — that while one door flies wide
open, others slowly creak to a close. Ericsson told me he
doesn't know of anyone who's become a world-class expert in more
than one skill.

That's why, he said,
becoming an expert in anything and placing 100% focus on becoming
the best in one domain "may not be basically the right thing here
for even the majority of people."

That is to say, there's
nothing inherently wrong with being average. In fact, working
toward expertise in any area can be a grueling, lonely, and often
ugly undertaking.

Ericsson, however, does
practice what he preaches. He said he personally uses the
principles of deliberate practice to become a better
researcher. Every article he published, as a
postdoctoral researcher and afterward, was the result
of multiple drafts and feedback from the psychologists he
was working with.

Ericsson cited one 1980 paper,
which he cowrote with the late cognitive psychologist Bill
Chase and published in the journal Science.

"Partly because I am
Swedish," Ericsson said, "it took over 30 different drafts with
comments on problems and issues by Bill before we had an article
that Bill was willing add his name to."